"My Computer Science Degree Journey" by Martin

 This week’s topic was Merge Sort and the Divide and Conquer algorithm. It was also the week of the midterm. I felt confident when I studied, but unfortunately, I didn’t get the grade I wanted. There were some questions I felt bad about failing. The first one was detecting the binary search tree, and the last one was about finding the fake coin among 20 coins and determining if it was heavier or lighter. I answered that it would take three weighings, but the correct answer was two because the question asked for the minimum number of weighings, not the guaranteed result.

 This week was a continuation of brute-force string matching. I think this topic is new to me, but it was easy to understand, at least the part that was mentioned. The same goes for exhaustive search. We also covered depth-first search and breadth-first search; I already had some idea about these. For divide and conquer, I was already familiar with it from sorting algorithms in videos I had watched before. Overall, this week included some topics I already knew, so I didn’t feel frustrated.

 This week, something interesting I learned about is the analysis of recursive and non-recursive algorithms. In this week’s homework, I used non-recursive algorithms to solve my problems. My algorithms in both cases focused on sorting, then checking: in one case, finding the minimum distance, and in another, shortening the consecutive range.

 For this week, I consider what I learned to be mixed because it was combined with week 0. It started with a review of linked lists, stacks, and queues, which I remember from my first data structures class. It also covered graphs and trees. However, one topic I do not remember from my past class, and would like to describe, is the Euclidean algorithm. This algorithm finds the greatest common divisor of two numbers by taking the last nonzero remainder.